Expected Completion
Spring 2018
Curriculum vitae (PDF)
Major Field
Economic Development
Dissertation Title
Essays on Global Development, Trade, and Finance
Profile
At the heart of my work is an
analysis of the structural features of late development. With a regional focus
on Africa, I also study the history of thought on development and analytically
evaluate policy proposals.
In my research, I draw on the
fields of development studies and international political economy, in addition
to economics. For example, in one of the essays in my dissertation, I develop a
classical-structuralist framework for understanding trade deficits through
empirical investigation of a set of African countries. I find that countries
that are less cost-competitive than their trading partners tend to have trade
deficits and that the exchange rate does not adjust in order to eliminate this
imbalance. To enrich this economic analysis, I draw on the effects of
historical legacies of colonialism and the political economy of trade and
production. In doing so, this essay analyzes the consequences of free trade for
countries that are globally uncompetitive, but also examines why these
countries lack competitiveness to begin with, and why it is so difficult for
them to become globally competitive.
My work has been published in
Review of
Development Economicsand Development and Change.
I have designed and taught
several undergraduate courses at The New School and John Jay College of
Criminal Justice. At The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, I
have served as a Teaching Fellow since 2016 and am currently teaching a course
that I designed on Alternative Approaches
to Economic Development. In this
course, students are presented with a variety of theoretical frameworks for
understanding issues of economic development, in addition to concrete
historical case studies. At John Jay, I most recently taught Global Economic Development and Crime,
an introductory course on economic development.
Beyond the classroom, I am
interested in promoting pluralism in the field of economics. I am a co-founder
and current Advisory Board Member of Rethinking
Economics Norway and coordinator of the INET-funded Economic Development Working Group of the Young Scholar’s
Initiative. I recently co-edited Dependency Theory, which introduces the
title concept to a general audience, and manage a blog that aims to stimulate fruitful
debate on issues of economic development across fields.
If you are interested in
having a conversation about my work, or have additional questions, please feel free
to get in touch. You can also visit my website.
Contact Information
ingridhk@newschool.edu
Expected Completion
Fall 2017
Curriculum vitae (PDF)
Dissertation Committee
Duncan Foley (Chair), Mark Setterfield, Paulo dos Santos, Deepankar Baseu (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
Profile
My primary fields of research are the Economics of Technical Change and Economic Growth; Information and Economics; and Bayesian Econometrics. I defended my dissertation, titled “Essays on the Statistical Equilibrium Model of Technical Change,” in October 2017.
My dissertation consists of three papers that use the notion of statistical equilibrium to generalize modern models of induced technical change stemming from von Weizsäcker (1964) and Kennedy (1964). The first paper “An Entropy-Constrained Model of Induced Technical Change with Single Innovation Possibilities Frontier” develops a general bounded-rationality model of ITC, in which a cost-minimizing entrepreneur has limited capacity to process all relevant market information so that s/he reaches the technological frontier probabilistically. The second paper—also my job market paper—“ A Bayesian Multiple Frontier Estimation in the Probabilistic Induced Technical Change Model: OECD Countries from 1968-2009,” develops a Bayesian cluster identification model to estimate the multiple technological frontiers for the OECD economies and explains a stylized fact of economic development of advanced economies from a low-wage, labor-intensive economy to a high-wage, capital-intensive economy. Finally, “Entropy-Constrained Induced Technical Change Model in an Interactive Factor Market: Statistical Equilibrium Approach,” further extends the entropy-constrained model of technical change by introducing a feedback mechanism of technical change on a factor market, which explains highly-regulated empirical patterns of the rate of cost reduction of firms in advanced EU countries.
I have begun publishing my works in peer-reviewed journals and books. One of my surveys papers, titled “Information Theoretic Approaches in Economics” has been published in the Journal of Economic Surveys. In this paper, I reviewed key elements of information theory, focusing on notions and applications of entropy and statistical equilibrium in economics, paying particular attention to how entropy concepts open up a new front line for economic research. Another paper, “A Bayesian Multilevel Estimation of Innovation Possibilities Frontier in the Induced Technical Change Model,” has been translated in Spanish and will be published in a book Technical Change Patterns in the Era of Global Capitalism (1980-2014)(forthcoming in 2018). Here, I use the Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the technological clusters of the world economy, and demonstrate the persistent trade-off between the growth rate of labor and capital productivity among the recovered clusters.
I have a wide range of teaching experience, from mentoring and tutoring undergraduate students in their research, to teaching introductory economics and graduate-level econometric courses. My teaching has been recognized by The New School, and I have had the honor of receiving the “Outstanding Student Teaching Award” in 2016, recognizing the best student teacher of the year. In 2017, I was awarded the “Eugene Lang Social Science Fellowship,” a grant awarded to an outstanding Ph.D. student to provide supervision to an advanced undergraduate student to write a high-quality research paper.
I will be attending the 2018 ASSA meetings in Philadelphia and welcome in-person conversations there about my work. I am also happy to field questions about my work via email.
Contact Information
yangj994@newschool.edu